March
Storm Valla, ridiculous colours by the channel, a sea eagle flowing overhead as we swam. When we got back, Glossy Black Cockatoos were noisily feeding outside, and the youngest of the three local joeys weeding our path with mum and auntie.
March 27, With sake, champagne and friends we celebrated our first anniversary in this house and the opening of our Japanese garden with a blessing by Kiyomi Takayama:
Takusan no shiawase ga kono niwa ni furisosogi masu you ni!
May much happiness pour into this garden!
Also counted up our bird list, 68 species in our garden or Jagun beside us (there will be many more). These included the Pacific Baza, Square tailed Kite, Regent Bowerbird and Red backed Wren.
The worrying news is the the spread of mytle rust and it's speed - it is now in Jagun.
Australia's east coast is facing an "ecological holocaust" unless something is done to stop the spread of mytle rust that kills eucalypts, bottlebrushes, paperbarks, lillypillies and turpentines (the myrtaceae family makes up 10 per cent of Australian flora). Birds and animals dependent on these species for food or shelter face tough times.
Myrtle rust cannot be eradicated; it produces vast numbers of spores easily spread by wind, human activity and animals. Myrtle rust attacks young, soft, actively growing leaves, shoot tips and young stems as well as fruits and flower parts of susceptible plants.
First signs of rust infection are tiny raised spots or pustules. After a few days, the pustules turn a distinctive egg-yolk yellow.
Preventing its spread in bushland see NSW PDF - but it is too late, not enough action taken when disease first seen in April 2010 on Central Coast
Not much info on treatment, the NSW govt suggest:
1. Spraying with an approved fungicide ("It is recommended that susceptible host plants be removed in highly infected areas, as reinfection after fungicide application is highly likely.")
2. Removing and disposal of diseased plants (not in green bin)
3. Doing nothing
4. Removing and disposal of healthy plants (drastic!)
Bron's print show at the Federal Hotel, Bello, all this month!
Green Room, monotope
Three print artists (with David Bromley and Deb Kay)
Oyster Creek
The middle
The middle
The end
The end
Roo sand painting
Black Rock field day courtesy of the Catchment Management Authority and Mark Robinson, plus many others working in the field. Masses of butterflies.
Orange streaked (or brown?) Ringlet
Paperbarks
This site is on its way to littoral rainforest - a 20X20 metre plot revealed over 50 native species (and 3 weeds after bush rdgeneration). Here you see the white flooded gums backing onto a paperbark swamp. There are rainforest trees like White Beech, Corkwood (I forget which one), Bolly Gum, (one young) Red Cedar, Bangalow Palms, some giant Banksias, young strangler figs, plenty of vines (and leeches).
Joey in our 7 Sages garden, he bounced across over the Japanese drystone garden sniffed some lemon grass. His mother was at the bottom of the bank and he leapt right over her head. Eastern Greys are so much better at weeding than wallabies, that eat anything, but they do like grevilleas.
B fishing the channel
Valla Fun Day
Uncle Larry and Uncle Barry smoking ceremony
Had a good yarn with them afterwards, and we planned an expedition.
Self Portrait in a convex mirror
. . . Vasari says, "Francesco one day set himself
To take his own portrait, looking at himself from that purpose
In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers . . .
He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made
By a turner, and having divided it in half and
Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself
With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass . . ."
It remains my favourite John Ashbery poem, despite what critics say.
A poet, Colosseum museum
Happy in Valla
“It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honourably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honourably and justly without living pleasantly.” Epicurus
The Epicurean tradition evolved out of the materialist atomism of Democritus (5th C BC) and though the writings of Epicurus (died 270 BC) have been mostly lost, his Latin follower Lucretius (died 50BC) provides much information is his wonderful informational poem, a philosophical epic De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe).
Epicurus belived happiness comes to those who live simply, and retreated from public life to his school, called The Garden. Happiness, he argued, comes from peace of mind, or ataraxia (freedom from disturbance, imperturbability). The pursuit of happiness does not denigrate pleasure or deny embodied experience, but only if consistent with ataraxia. We are more likely to experience happiness if we understand the universe and ourselves, rejecting the supernatural with its false hopes and ignorant terrors. He felt that a garden and friendship were essentials for happiness.
Yesterday we started a new miniature orchard beside our Japanese garden, planting small exotics suited to our sub-tropical climate: a red-fruited Strawberry Guava; a Nagasakiwase Loquat with deep orange flesh and a sweet almost apricot flavour; a Black Grumichama with purplish-black cherry like fruit, and a Jaboticaba (the Brazilian Grape Tree) which fruits directly on the trunk (fooling the birds).
“Bob Cummins, Australia's leading happiness expert and lead researcher on the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index, confirms Sydneysiders are the most miserable of all the state capital residents bar Perth, which is also dealing with rapid population growth and strain on resources.
Professor Cummins says the happiest place to live in Australia is probably a regional centre, somewhere near the coast, with a population of about 20,000 to 30,000 people, meaning there is enough infrastructure to support them and they do not feel disconnected from the neighbours. 'If you feel attached to your community, you tend to know the people around you and tend to trust them more, you tend to feel safer.'”
Jessica Irvine, ‘Sydney is a sadder, meaner, angrier city’, SMH, March 18.
In such regional centres you are intimate with natural environments and have good friends, so modern views on happiness are congruent with Epicurus. And there is empirical evidence that the re-introduction of natural environments like parks, gardens, and street trees into urban areas has beneficial effects, such as, increasing an individual's health and happiness, reducing crime and increasing social cohesion.
(Mind you we were very happy in Sydney too, but after nearly a year in Valla we haven't missed the city once).
"I summon you to continuous pleasures and not to vain and empty virtues which have but a desperate hope for rewards." Letter to Anaxarchus
"I am thrilled with pleasure in the body, when I live on bread and water, and I spit upon luxurious pleasures not for their own sake, but because of the inconveniences that follow them." Letter to unknown person
Way Way State Forest, suffering from logging and the effects of last week's storm, but a lyrebird sang a wonderful stream of mimicry.
Track through Way Way.
Snail shell
Thirteen minutes
an MP3 of kookaburras' song & dance
Our alarm clock goes off well before the sun rises over the sea. Taken from our bedroom window, you can hear the sea, insects (katydids and crickets, the males stridulate, making the sound by scraping one forewing against the other) and the laughing kookaburra, with a lot of what sounds like giggling, two young birds in the family are learning to sing.
Listen out for the beautiful Pied Butcherbird at 3 minutes in, and at 6 minutes some lorikeets and other birds. At 8.30 minutes cicadas kick in from the forest beside us, then at 10 the butcherbird's other three note call, followed by the chuckle of a Lewins Honeyeater and the sound of trucks on the highway with other birds joining in. At the end some Rainbow Lorikeets rush past.
The kookaburra’s famous ‘laugh’ is a territorial call; they are monogamous and live in close family groups that don’t migrate but stay in fixed and fiercely defend their territories. The female lays 1-5 eggs in a tree hollow between September and January, and raise the young with the father and siblings. Siblings usually stay for a few years before leaving to find their own territories being old enough to breed and defend a territory.
The natural range of Dacelo novaeguineae extends from Cape York down the East coast to South Australia and inland along the river systems. They were introduced into Tasmania just over a century ago and into the south of Western Australia just over twenty years ago. They are kingfishers who prefer dry land to water.
They are intelligent birds, have started to come onto our balconies when we are there, realising we are no threat, perhaps hoping for a handout, if people have fed them before. They like our house, it has perches to view a garden with plenty of cleared ground where they search for food and is next to a forest with old trees with holes large enough to nest in and with cover for roosting. They develop an intimate knowledge of their territory.
According to one Aboriginal legend, the kookaburra's morning chorus is a signal for the sky people to light the great fire that lights and warms the earth by day.
You may have heard them call loudly while watching a scene:
in the Amazon rainforest (Raiders of the Lost Ark);
in the East Indies (of the Swiss Family Robinson, wrecked on their way to Sydney, but filmed on the island of Tobago, West Indies);
in the Himalayas around the Palace of Mopu, near Darjeeling, (Black Narcissus);
on the Borgo mountain pass, Transylvania, still the main route today through the eastern range of the Carpathian Mountains (Jesus Franco's Count Dracula); and most famously,
in the thick jungles of Africa's dark interior as Tarzan swung into the 20th century from his estate in British East-Africa,
somewhere in the cannibal infested South Seas (Black Adder, 'Potato', series 2).
‘Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree / with a toothache bad as can be.’
"The Australian pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis) . . . . Analysis (including transcriptions and sonograms) of solo song, duets and mimicry illustrates their remarkable preoccupation with novelty and variety, and traces improvisation's role in the creation of their complex song culture." Hollis Taylor
March 12. Tiger Moths mating
March 11. Bellingen Bench, missing text.
March 10. Between 40 and 50 per cent of Australians are ''very concerned'' about a range of issues from waste generation to air pollution to climate change. . . But Australians are relatively unprepared to believe we can do anything about it. Almost 5 per cent think there's no point in taking action as an individual or a household, more than in any nation surveyed. . .
Peter Martin, ‘Save the environment? What's the point’, March 10, SMH
This shows a lack of imagination (see Nehemas quote below 'sunrise with weeds') and knowledge.
Went to a field day to identify grasses, aimed at farmers primarily. Weeds are a blight on farms and natural environments, and new weeds are appearing all the time. We realised we have a problem with Whisky grass (so called because it was used to pack barrels of Scotch), and being butted up against a relatively weed free nature reserve, we have responsibilities.
I thought I make no money from poetry, so why not enter a competition. A winner! $250 and a 1 in 4 chance of a trip to LA (only ever been in the airport) with tickets to Disneyland.
I was fascinated by Watts Towers thirty years ago, so they would be on the agenda, maybe the Eco-Logical ART Gallery or the LA County Museum of Art currently showing 'Elizabeth Taylor in Iran', I was there in 76 as well but never bumped into her. I'd head to the Getty - not to see Van Gogh's 'Irises' first bought by the anarchist Octave Mirbeau (for 300 francs). In 1987, it became the most expensive painting ever bought before being sold on to Alan Bond for US$53.9 million. He couldn't pay for it, so in 1990 the J. Paul Getty Museum bought it.
March 9
Tawny Frogmouth sitting on a koala
Two frogmouths were hunting from our bird netting - one perched on the koala opposite our driveway (take my word for it).
A dragonfly rescued from the minstrel butcherbirds.
All is change, particularly in modern cities like Sydney - it is is not the same city as the one I arrived in 31 years ago; one reason we left.
"Does anyone remember the Trade Union Club? Sydney in the 1980s was a city characterised as a place of live music. Every pub seemed to have gigs and everyone was trying to make music. Not only music, but comedy and poetry and stuff at the weirdest edges of performance." Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton, ‘Sydney needs some of its old-time black magic back’, address to the City of Sydney council, March 8, 2011
Ezra Pound like Plato thought you could socially engineer cities, though Plato wanted technocrate or as Pound put it "the segregation of officials in Washington” but Pound said, “I want painters, sculptors, musical composers, architects, scholars in the art of verse." ('America, changes and remedies' 1913). Cities are organic lives of energy and excess and suffer death, decay and misery, neither technology nor the arts alone can revive a city, as Lewis Mumford said it "involves the larger task of rebuilding our civilisation."
I was a member of the Trades Union Club, went to see bands there and played snooker upstairs . . . the rest is opaque from the fog of time.
Letter to the editor, SMH, 9 March
“When I first arrived, in the early 1980s, Sydney seemed to me the most vibrant and seductive town on the planet", wrote Elizabeth Farrelly in your pages ten years ago. Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton agree and so do I, but after thirty years I have left the beast. It took me 1 hour and 20 minutes to reach Circular Quay from Enmore one morning by bus before I did. The city was becoming too frenetic (and too slow) to be able to exercise Walt Whitman’s appetite for the energy of Manhattan, or Baudelaire's passion for the first modern city, Paris. And the hope of Lewis Mumford half a century ago for "organic cities" in touch with natural environments has not been realised. I wish Sydney well, but now live beside a forest by the sea, happy as a sandboy (whoever he is)." [In fact they were probably boys from the Redcliffe caves carved out of red sandstone in Bristol that I knew].
Night spotting in Valla Reserve on the way to watch sunrise over the sea, no luck at first, then a common Brushtail Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) ambled along the dirt track (a nice change from seeing dead ones on the highway), then in dense growth by the dunes, my torch picked out an amber shine, a small Sugar Glider (Petaurus breviceps) was clambering around.
image by Pavel German
And then the sunrise at Valla - why I have not missed Sydney.
The first birds at 5.50am were Fan tailed Cuckoos, the Kookas were a good twenty minutes later, and then a couple of surfers half an hour after that.
“The worst, the most difficult thing that affects us as people is the failure of the imagination. We do not realise that various things are possible, which is to say that we don't realize that most everything is contingent, that things could be different. If we see the contingency in our private lives, we will see it in the public world as well. And we will realize that we can change that world - though only a little at a time.” Alexander Nehamas
Heraclitus, famous for saying chnage is the natural state of all things is closer to Lao Tzu and Taoism than other philosophers. Heidegger recounts Aristotle’s story of strangers visiting Heraclitus and being bemused by his ragged look as he warmed himself by a simple stove. He noticed their confusion, or perhaps disdain, and said, “The gods are present here too.”
Elisabet Sahtouris believes our current predicament is due to unsustainable ideas generated by the scientific mechanistic worldview an ancient argument between the rational transendentalists, Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras versus Heraclitus, Anaximander who had a more organic view and saw the earth as (Gaia) being alive.
I think the underlying problem is the mind/body and reason/emotion dichotomies. Plato was obsessed with these issues. At the start of the Phaedrus, Socrates stresses that rational argument is the method for quarrying truth and further, requires for its practice, discipline and control of bodily desires and passions. He thought body appetites distract the mind and intense emotions confuse the mind – since poetry is concerned with affect this is a key issue in Plato’s distrust of poetry.
An unusually white Bleating Tree Frog on our balcony. There has been an albino Leaden Flycatcher around; albino animals tend to die young, too easily spotted by predators.
"She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her `Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir.” Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers.
There is no way we can manage this land.
Of the 28,000 plants deliberately introduced to feed stock or decorate gardens, or accidentally established, nearly 3,000
have become naturalised and some of these would take over
our world if left to themselves -
our rainforest remnants would be choked by rubber vine;
our woodlands by blackberry and lantana;
native grasslands and pasture would become empires
of Chilean Needle grass and Parthenium;
the dunes would sink beneath Bitou bush and Boneseed;
Mimosa and Parkinsonia would strangle our wetlands;
and Salvinia and Cabomba would infest our waterways.
There is no way we cannot manage this land.
Sounding like a bulldog/horn on our bedroom balcony, Green Tree Frog
First day of Autumn
The hottest day of the year, after birding etc.
Land Mullet ( Egernia major )
A skinny dip in the ocean then plenty of work on the lit festival. At dusk a party to open the new garden, with our barrel of sake we'd been saving for the right occasion.
Zen Pete
Roo party poopers
What a storm, at the pub we were eating by candlight, below in the garden, power gone, thought it was quiet . . . the pub had closed. Back home mopped up from the horizontal rain winging in through a few half-open louvres.
Saw our first Tawny Frogmouth perched on the bird netting.
February
Dawn Valla, Feb 25
I once took photographs for the photograph,
not to capture some likeness of the world
but to make a unique weight on paper.
The one I just took of a silver tango
on the sea beneath dark cloud inflating
remnant heights, didn’t really work
and colours wiped moments ago are back,
a flush of growth tints the amphora of ocean.
The kookaburras quieten, the dawn chorus stirs.
I’m a dilettante, prefer nothing too onerous
or spectacular, but this view that frames us
of ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ stroking the ocean’s
taut blue negative tempts me so much
that I am becoming a connoisseur of this daily reminder
that sunrise is flushed from effort.
Homer knew dawn to be a goddess and that the natural
cannot be extricated from the rest of it, whatever it is,
shards of glass, unnatural spirit, supernatural bone-dust.
Joey in our garden
Joey in our garden, Nov 2010
Photos from our French friends Maurice & Eva, below at Dorrigo.
Here is an example of a birding stance
Male Regent Bowerbird
A Simple Natural Aesthetic
Sunrise Feb 27th
Sunset Feb 26th
Sunrise Feb 25th
Sunset Feb 25th
Sunrise Feb 24th
Sunset Feb 23rd
As much as I enjoy looking at a work by Jacob van Ruisdael or John Constable with their vast skies released into light, whirling shades of cloud over distance floating the low sloping remnants of civilisation . . . I can see from this balcony maybe 50 miles of sky and out to sea, a glorious dawn, the sun rising behind clouds that glow and develop an electric edge with rays that forge upwards and outwards. There is magic here, an alchemy of light, fresh air, and birdsong in a beautiful environment . . . so lucky.
The scene is so brilliant I am forced to look, and then look away, seeing spots of light against the blackbutts, like rose cirrocumulus or a formation of UFOs, reminding me of Newton, so curious about light he stared into the sun and had to retire to bed in a dark room for several days. He was a mischievous, lonely boy who liked to read and make things, including a UFO fashioned out of a lantern attached to a kite. He flew it at night “which wonderfully affrighted all the neighboring inhabitants.” (see Sam Kean, ‘Newton the Last Magician’)
Friday
Our Eastern Grey roos are much fussier than the wallabies that stick to the other side of the highway, sticking to grass, or almost. This roo nearly demolished a young Echium, so Bron undertook immediate defensive measures.
Thursday
Tired from creating our new garden compartment - oriental and formal with black bamboo, a magnolia, maples and a Moreton Bay fig we rescued and bonsaied.
Late arvo
Early morning
A weekend of birding
At Jerseyville, so many kingfishers, one azure fishing being mobbed or stalked by a swallow; no brolgas this time, plenty of cows.
and at Valla, many birds and a white red-necked wallaby grazing beside a swamp wallaby, the Eastern froglet a delight for me!
At home
Redback - very painful bite but no deaths since 1956 when a vaccine was released.
Blue garden flatworm, harmless
Tree frog among tree frogs
Tree frog among solar powered tree frogs (without flash)
Rainbows at Dusk
Murder on the Orient Express (amnesia)
A poem has immense power and freedom, but is a rare event/object/performance in our culture. Poetry is so underrated and overrated - we are all capable of making poems without special training in language or form to 'make special' with words. So many Australian poets are playing with traditional forms, like the pantoum and villanelle, a sign of skill, a test of resolve, and a process of writing what you would not otherwise write, but repetition, the heart of oral poetry, hymns and prayers, is not needed for written poetry. You just need to be wide awake.
The first time I sailed to Byzantium was on the Orient Express, when on its last legs in the seventies, rather dilapidated, we somehow wangled our way on board and were allowed to kip in the luggage car. We slipped through the Iron Curtain and woke at dawn, rolling past the walls and domes of Topkapi Palace and boats scraping modest wakes across the vivacious blue of the Golden Horn.
I worshipped silence in the great mosques, sailed across the Bosphorus, ate fish from the old Galata Bridge, choked on hot chillis, smelt the fires smoking the past. Forget the luxuries of court and culture, the ingenious entertainments procured for emperors; silk and damask is growing from branches out of the earth, enamel is forged in the sky. The wildlife outplays the mechanical marvels, masques and fetes, this place has real birds, not a poet’s fantasy.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’
from ‘A Satin Bowerbird Collaboration’ Bundanon
What I didn’t mention was that I had lost a day of my life on the Orient Express. I watched Poirot on the train last night, now an older, more jaundiced character, praying with his rosary and in tears at the end. The head of the railway insisted a place be found for the Belgian detective, “We won’t have you sleeping in the baggage car.” That’s where we slept, sleeping bags rolled out courtesy of a friendly guard. It cost next to nothing (it now costs nearly $3,000 a day). I got drunk on duty free vodka and wandered off. My mate Dave [my friend Mick has just read this and tells me it was a different trip and he was the one frantic with worry, not Dave - such is my memory] became concerned after a few hours and searched the train, asked the conductor, after 12 hours he asked them to call the police, but they weren’t interested – he thought I must have fallen off leaving my backpack behind. I turned up nearly 24 hours later, with a bump on my head and no memory of where I had been.
I admit being very young and very drunk unlike the Right Rev Tom Butler, the Bishop of Southwark, often on BBC Radio 4’s 'Thought for the Day'. He attended a reception at the Irish embassy then turned up with a bump on his head minus his crucifix, briefcase, mobile phone or any memory of where he had been. He said he had probably been mugged and was undergoing tests for amnesia, though witnesses claimed they found him in the back of their car, pissed as newt, throwing their children’s' toys out of the window while shouting: "I'm the Bishop of Southwark. It's what I do." (Dec, 2006)
Mind & Memory Memory makes us human and human individuals.
More on Egypt, yes Muburak gone with millions of dolalrs, and a comment on the website:
"I was just looking at your website and noticed the following: Egypt is a strange word. . . . In the seventies I used to see its sign on my way to a friend's (north west of Burnham Beeches - I started doing paper rounds for the newsagent in Farnham Common, about 1.5 miles north of Farnham Royal, and 1.5 miles south of Egypt. My main round there ended in Egypt so I used to go there 7 days a week in the early morning. Btw, I think “north west” is wrong and should be “north east” as it is alongside the Beaconsfield Rd in the vicinity of the Yew Tree pub, just south of the dipper that we used to call Dingle Dell. It (Dingle Dell) used to have masses of Rhododendrons but when I went through there last June they had started hacking them out as they are doing in much of southern England as they are becoming a bit of a monoculture."
A robber fly (Ommatius mackayi) holding his position for a couple of minutes, making a loud buzzing sound, sizing up the situation before darting in and clutching her to briefly mate.
They hunt in mid-air, eat anything that flies they can catch, but the female often rejects her male suitor, instead stabbing him with her lancet and eating him.
Dawn, a cursive script, Arabic probably. There's an 'n', maybe a 'p' or 'b', definitely a 'y'.
Nightspotting for gliders last night - heard bats, frogs and a roo, but apart from moths and spiders the only reflected light were these jewels in the forest.
Hawk moths, Gnathothlibus Sphingidae, mating. Two beads of light about 6 cms apart, took a while to work out they were moths' eyes reflecting like garnets. It's a terrible photograph - a good example of why getting out into the bush is so important, now that we experience wild animals through mechanical reproduction.
Richard Mabey comments on David Attenborough's ‘The Life of Mammals’: “The programme was soon reverting to type in other ways. A baboon was shown catching and eating a flamingo, a sight so bizarre it seemed like a particularly surreal version of Alice in Wonderland. (It was shown again in slow motion to make sure we realised it was special.)”
John Terborgh, an ornithologist in the Amazon region, tells a typical story of a colleague leaving ecotourism because: "Too many customers went away complaining: The humidity was uncomfortable, insects assaulted them, and the animals they had found so appealing on the television screen were nowhere to be seen."
Night spotting
Two eyes fire a rich carmine amber,
back to back Hawk moths, glinting coitus
to the sounds of frogs and bats.
Our footsteps heading to the creek
extract a roo bumping through the forest.
The torch beam on random skates along
branches looking for gliders, snagging
on large orb spinners webbing the path
where a caterpillar hangs by a thread.
At track’s end I look up at the forest
faintly reflected in our tree house
from a repertoire of half-moon and starlight,
the Milky Way, that unknown narrative
. . . fragrant,
remote sensing.
The lit sea Feb 9
Feb 6. The news carries a report that human brains have shrunk over the past 30,000 years . . . Is your Brain Big Enough?
Egypt is still in the news with crowds demanding change, with the police and secret police out of sight.
I was arrested at the Barrages, north of Cairo; I had taken a ferry up the Nile, hearing the place was good for birdwatching. I discovered a tawdry tourist park with donkey rides, balloons, icecreams and plenty of litter. I followed a wall posted with 'No Photographs', then a kingfisher, I hadn't yet seen, flew over the wall. I looked around, saw no-one, noted there were no signs 'No Binoculars'stretched on tip-toe, brought the glasses to my face and scanned the immaculate lawns with borders and trees for the bird. Almost immediately, my shoulders were clamped tightly and I was led away.
(It was probably a White-throated Kingfisher carrying that vast carmine beak; I thought it was the Presidential Palace, and it was - perhaps Hosni Mubarak was at home. Let's hope he leaves home any day now).
Lying forward on the felucca, squeezed beneath
the simple triangular sail, watching pied kingfishers hover
and dive off jagged heron-stalked granite islands,
the pale stones of Philae floating near on palm trees.
Small birds play in the mimosa, the fast black
shadows of sand martins trawl an open court.
The pharaoh god controlled the Nile with maat
order and justice flowing with the waters of fertility;
a fascist theocracy naturalised by framing
institutions, beliefs and artistic practices
in place by 3000BC, lasting much longer
than the Third Reich Hitler had planned . . .
from a long poem 'On Earth' with the epitaph:
'It is my great purpose to free men's minds from superstition
and I am adorning obscure thoughts with the beauty of poetry.'
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
Egypt is a strange word. In the seventies I used to see its sign on my way to a friend's (north west of Burnham Beeches - one of the last tracts of woodland in Southern England). I always meant to turn off and visit, just to say I'd been. Strabo attributed the word to Aígyptos, a derivation of 'below the Aegean'.
Deep Creek bottom pitted like the moon; five or more species of stingarees live along the NSW coastline.
Printing some photographs, at last.
The Nile from Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (The Nile lost) and an inscription from the Coliseum.
There was great opposition to the building of this wonderful fountain, a revolution in expressivity and movement for public sculpture. An early example of the problems of PUBLIC ART.
Lord Clark's 13 part 'Civilisation' from 1969, has been remastered by the BBC for HD TV and will be shown again. What about 'Ways of Seeing'?:
'Our concept was, I suppose, distinctly opposed to programmes like Civilisation. Kenneth Clark was a much more erudite art historian than I was, or am. He was an expert, sharing his knowledge with those less expert. And we wanted somehow, now one would say to destructure expertise, to throw the initiative, democratically, to the spectators. That was our strategy.' John Berger, interviewed by Lewis Jones, 2001.
2011